When I first heard All I Wanna Do, a nihilistic paean to the dancefloor that channels, equally, Grace Jones, Rupaul and Fozzy Bear, I blithely assumed that it was the work of a gay man. Even after seeing Aérea Negrot play live at Watergate in Berlin, earlier this year – where, admittedly, I only caught glimpses of the singer's tightly shaved, micro-quiffed head through a shoal of clubbers – I still thought Negrot was a young man, Arabic or north African, in origin, possibly French.

I was wrong on all counts. He is actually a she, and she was born in Venezuela. Instinct tells me, however, that Negrot, a free spirit who has lived in The Hague, Porto and Berlin, a sometime avant-garde dancer and classically trained singer, best known for her work with Hercules & Love Affair, would be amused by such misunderstanding. In her bohemian world, gender, sexuality, nationality are fluid concepts. Individuality is all. On her debut album, Arabxilla, she certainly resists easy categorisation.

Arabxilla may be an open book – a diary, almost – but it is a confusing read. Co-produced with Tobias Freund, it's a subtle, atmospheric house and techno record given to Weimar cabaret interludes and jazzy inflections, over which Negrot sings (part Maria Callas, part Klaus Nomi) in a mixture of Spanish, English and German.

In every way it's a personal project (solipsistic, you might say), which oscillates between the sublime and ridiculous, the profound and frivolous. One minute, Negrot is the camp diva, despairing at – how can I put this delicately? – trigger-happy one-night stands. The next, she is breaking your heart in two, with the beautiful It's Lover, Love, in which, no matter how many times she washes her bedding, she can't get her ex-lover's smell off the pillow cases.

Elsewhere, Negrot explores her dysfunctional relationship with her parents, explains why she sometimes shaves her head ("it's not fashion/ it's just stress") and revels in the exoticism of London, where she studied at the Centre of Contemporary Music. She finds it fascinating: the EastEnders' omnibus, the local Tesco Metro. All the while, she asks you to go with this idiosyncratic flow, the lurches in tone and content.

This makes me worry for Negrot. Or worry about people's reaction to the, initially, bewildering, messy Arabxilla. What is it? What do you call it? Where would you play it? Is it serious? A joke?

While in a novel this kind of thing (toying with your audience; personal obsessions; discursive rumination) might be admired, music culture favours those acts that keep it simple. It pays to make yourself clearly understood, to neatly fit pre-existing pigeonholes. Electronic/dance music could, arguably, claim to be the last refuge of the sort of irony and elusiveness that was once treasured in David Bowie or Pet Shop Boys, but, ultimately, it focuses primarily on bangers, anthems, stock characters.

That is why Deadmau5, Tiësto and the Swedish House Mafia are huge, while, even at an underground level, those who make awkward, genre-flouting, highly personal music (James Teej, Simon Bookish, Drums of Death, Damian Lazarus, Jay Haze, Circlesquare) are confined to the margins. Even a leftfield godhead like Ricardo Villalobos is famous, in part, because he is an archetype.

If you're too flamboyant, too arch, too conceptual, refuse to explain yourself, then, as Fischerspooner found out (a band clever enough to woo Susan Sontag, but not Britain), you are deemed suspect. Likewise, if you have the temerity to be funny – see, Ost & Kjex or Nôze – people seem incapable of ever taking you seriously.

In her playful, painful, at times melodramatic way, Aérea Negrot is crediting her audience with intelligence. She is trusting our ability to process Arabxilla on several levels. Often, that is career suicide.